Russia

“This is a, you know, country that just won't fundamentally matter in the world over the next 15 to 20 years.”

“I would refine what I'm saying by saying it's a distribution of risk where it's closer to Russia now than it is to the United States.”

“I think to Sax's point, it's highly unlikely we're gonna end up sending military.”

“If we would just give up on that position or just reaffirm that Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO, it would enormously help defuse tensions with Russia.”

“Will sanctions work in terms of being a strong deterrent? No, I don't think so.”

“When I was thinking about the odds of this, just from a financial perspective and, you know, whether I should be doing something different and putting something on, I thought that there was zero chance that this would happen. Literally, I put it as close to ze…”

“I do think, and I don't know if we're going to hear more about this today, but I do think that the cyber war is beginning today.”

“However, we are not going to intervene militarily in that conflict, nor should we, because we cannot risk starting World War III. It is not a vital American interest.”

“He's a coldly ruthless rational actor. That's sort of the opposite of a madman. I mean, his red lines have been clear. He's been stating them for years.”

“If we had been willing to basically affirm That we believe in Ukraine's sovereignty, but they are not a part of NATO. That might have diffused this conflict.”

“With cable news and now social media. And partisan rhetoric. It all pushes us towards continual escalation and World War III.”

“The only end game now is regime change.”

“Any sort of assumption that leads to our belief that an alternative intervention or some other force can ultimately win against Russia is, is completely false because Russia has thousands of nuclear warheads.”

“Great powers, whether it's Russia or the Soviet Union or us will behave viciously and ruthlessly towards anything they perceive as a threat to their national security and their vital national security interests.”

“By the way, Russia and the Ukraine combined account for roughly 25% of global wheat exports.”

“Russian GDP has actually decayed 35% in the last decade. It was, it peaked in 2013 at 2.292 trillion dollars. And so, and all the way down to now, 1.4 or three.”

“There's a transition that's happening mainly because of China. So we're, and I, you know, it seems like what we're doing is pushing Russia irrevocably into Xi's arms.”

“What a no-fly zone means is that you're going to shoot down Russian planes. That's what it means. You are going to war. It may not be boots on the ground. It's boots in the sky.”

“And so I suspect, and you know, I could be completely wrong, is that we're much closer to a ceasefire than anybody thinks. And I suspect that you could see something in the next two to three weeks.”

“That are not just about sanctions, but also about export controls by Russia that are creating swings in food markets like we've never seen, and will almost certainly lead to widespread famine by the end of this year at this point.”

“We have to implement energy independence writ large, and we have to make sure that it is very clear we have influence amongst all these OECD countries, because if China takes one foot over the line, We have to have the ability to do to them what we've done to …”

“If you were to look at this from the Chinese standpoint, they must be loving what's going on. Loving it. Old saying, I think Napoleon said it, never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. Why is China So quiet right now. Well, yeah, because they love…”

“Humans today, I think, have the ability to synthesize and print food. And over the next couple of decades, particularly catalyzed by what's going on in Russia, Ukraine today, we're going to see these technologies accelerate.”

“I think it's very likely that the way this is going to play out geopolitically is that Russia will become a Chinese client.”

“The broad contours of what a peace deal would look like, which is there's three main pieces. Neutrality for Ukraine. The Russians insist that it not be part of NATO. They get to keep Crimea, which they annexed in 2014. That's been a fait accompli. And then som…”

“What the US should be doing is leading, they should be pushing for Lead, not bleed. Lead the way to a ceasefire, not to inflict maximum damage on the Russian regime.”

“I think we're moving into the second phase of this war, which is effectively trying to bait Russia into doing something really egregiously bad.”

“Putin's approval rating in Russia is 83%. So his approval ratings have gone up. We thought not, you could say it's fake or whatever, but apparently this is a reasonably decent polling operation. This is a poll by Lovato Center, an independent pollster in Mosco…”

“China and India are both de facto on Russia's side of this.”

“Here are the top 20 countries by population, and the ones in yellow are the ones who refuse to support the UN resolution expelling Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and you can see that it's nine out of the 10 Most populous countries”

“Apparently, 80 to 90% of the population in Crimea is Russian and wants to be part of Russia.”

“No, we're in a proxy war.”

“It's not the case that eastern Ukraine is pro-Russian.”

“Russia's not aggressive because, so hold on a second, let me finish the thought. Right, right, no, hold on. Russia's, let me respond to the point that you've sat there for two minutes staring at. Russia is not surrounded by NATO. Russia isn't aggressive becaus…”

“So I think that the end game is probably some organized, negotiated detente and ceasefire.”

“Xi is not. And Xi is much more hedged and moderate and, you know, wanted to have more optionality and felt that he was cornered”

“And that is what we're going to end up with. The only difference is that it's going to be implemented by force and Ukraine will be destroyed in the process.”

“I'm gonna make a prediction, right? I think the Western Alliance is gonna fracture come this winter.”

“And I think similarly with Russia, we've basically declared ourselves to be engaged in this proxy war with Russia, which strategically, there's just nothing in it for us.”

“Russia's a much poorer country in the US. We're actually 15 times richer than them. During the Cold War, at their peak, we were only three times richer than them. But we're 15 times richer, but they still got over 6000 nukes.”

“The third Contention that was made by advocates of this proxy war is that the sanctions would hurt Russia more than Europe. That has not happened. Europe is already hurting more than Russia. And it's about with winter coming, it's going to hurt even more.”

“Boris Johnson went to Ukraine and said, no deal, do not take the deal. We need to weaken Putin and Russia, not compromise with them.”

“I think there's an equal and opposite chance that that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen, okay? But I think there's an equal... An opposite chance that instead what happens is that we climb the escalatory ladder that Putin, I think we are backing him…”

“America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons. Okay. This sort of the long range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it. They're training them on how to use it. They've got command…”

“I think Biden stated the policy, which is this man cannot remain in power. I think he blurted out the truth of his policy. This is a regime change policy. That's what they're going for. They're, they are backing him into a corner.”

“I think it's been made pretty clear that both India and China will not stand beside Russia if they do something like this. And I think that that is important because they still are the two biggest purchasers of Russian oil.”

“So I don't see how you're going to get a peace deal now. And so if you remove all the off ramps, what's left? Escalation. So it seems to me this thing's just going to keep escalating.”

“If I was a betting man, I spent the I would guess that the next half a trillion to a trillion dollars that is spent in Western world economies will be to subsidize something that's broken internally inside of one of our countries, whether it's the UK pension s…”

“That's the paradox of this war is that if Russia faces the prospect of a total defeat, that's when they're most likely to escalate. This conflict into something much, much worse.”

“The Ukraine Russia war is evidence that, you know, this Highly sophisticated war machine and propaganda machine is not that good at their job.”

“There will be a deal between Putin and Xi. And they met by satellite late last week to discuss ways to further help each other in 2023.”

“And what we're doing right now, what we're doing right now is pushing China and Russia together into a new axis block.”

“If we had just done those three things, there would have been no war.”

“India is the biggest democracy in the world, and our relations with them have gone south since this war because they have a friendship with Russia that goes back the wrong way.”

“The Russians actually have a six to one artillery advantage, which is why they're actually doing much better in this war than people are acknowledging.”

“Russia is basically using about 20,000 shells a day. The Ukrainians are using somewhere between three and 6000.”

“A deal was available, but the West chose not to take it.”

“China will do what it has to do to support and even prop up Russia if they have to.”

“I think you could see now over the next few months, a full mobilization in Russia. And I think that this could lead us to the next point of escalation in this war.”

“I think we're gonna see in the next 10 years, Putin lose power and he's going to be out of power.”

“What you're much more likely to end up with is an even worse dictator or a hardliner. And I think that is what would have happened if Rogozin had taken over. I think it would have been much worse for the West.”

“Russia is winning the war, and you may hate Putin, but he is still a master of Russia, and eventually we're gonna have to deal with him.”

“Russia right now is supplying half of India's oil, and India has adamantly refused to play along with the US sanctions.”

“So no, I wouldn't have been willing to do it in 21 in order to avoid it because quite frankly, I don't believe that it would have avoided it just would have forestalled it.”

“Starlink is the fundamental communication backbone of the Ukrainian government and essential services, like first responders and that kind of thing. And, you know, it's used, we hope peacefully, relatively peacefully on the war front. It is the only thing that…”

“There's an article recently in the New York Times where it said that the cost of the United States of producing an artillery shell is 6000 dollars. For Russia, it's 600 dollars. So in other words, it costs the US 10 times what it costs Russia to produce an art…”

“The Ukrainians are dying in much higher numbers, and Russia's a much bigger country. They've got something like five times the population.”

“If you look at what's happened this year, so let's just put a pin in what happened last year, because I think there's different ways of interpreting it, but if you look at what's happened this year, and certainly over the last five months, Ukraine has made no …”

“When we were in kind of our worst moments in COVID, the second country that sent us a plane load of supplies and ventilators when New York looked like it was, you know, on the verge of going under was Russia.”

“As I've been saying for a while, it's not a stalemate. The Russians are winning”

“What was Russia demanding? They were demanding Ukrainian neutrality. They were not basically looking to conquer Ukraine. They wanted them to be neutral. So Ukraine did not have to give up its freedom. Okay. They just had to agree to be neutral.”

“It turns out that as many drones as Ukrainians have been able to put on the battlefield, the Russians have even more because they're able to mass produce them in factories. They've got Bigger drones, better drones. And I think the most important variable in th…”

“So for 20 years, I heard that NATO if Ukraine goes into NATO, it's a real problem for Russia. I've heard that for a long time. And I think that's really why this war started.”

“The Paris Accord was a disaster for us. We were going to pay a trillion dollars, and other countries were paying nothing. Russia was paying nothing. China was paying nothing. It didn't even kick in for China until 2030, whereas with us it kicked in immediately…”

“The big loser of last night's debate was the American public. The big winner of last night's debate was probably Russia, China, Iran, maybe the Saudis licking their chops, watching the utter dysfunction in the leadership of the party, in the leadership of the …”

“With regard to Russia, I don't think Russia is a serious threat to the United States. And indeed, I think the United States should have good relations with Putin. It's a remarkably foolish policy to push him into the arms of the Chinese.”

“So this to me is the most definitive fact of our lives, which is we are now in a war, direct war, not proxy war, direct war with Russia, which has 6000 nuclear warheads.”

“China is a peer competitor to the United States. It's the most serious threat to the United States. Russia is the weakest of those three great powers, and it's not a serious threat to us.”

“The sources I've read suggest that the Ukrainians are losing about 30,000 troops per month. And that's just KIA.”

“I think that Ukraine within, it could be in the next month. It could be the next two months. It could be the next six months. I think they're eventually going to collapse. They're getting close to being combat incapable.”

“And you know what matches up perfectly? What matches up perfectly is that 9.1% in 2022 and the day that that agreement ended. Where MBS and Russia limited production, that agreement ended it like this.”

“There are SMRs operating in China, Russia, and India today. And there's about 65 being built at this moment, right?”

“If you actually listen to what the Russians have said, there's only been two red lines. The first red line was they said they would not accept NATO expanding to Ukraine, and they proved their seriousness on that issue by invading Ukraine in February of 2022. T…”

“I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very, very a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine.”

“Because meanwhile, what you have is China militarizing very aggressively, Russia militarizing very aggressively. And what you don't want to have happen is those two countries take control of that northern passage as the ice sheet melts.”

“If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They got all the drones. Even in Ukraine, both sides are getting all their drone parts from DJI. Now they're getting it through different supply chains and so on, but Ukraini…”

“China is the peer competitor. It's the only country in the world that is a peer of the United States. It's the only country that's really capable of threatening our security. Russia is a distant number three in terms of the great power rankings.”

“And if you look at what the people of Crimea want, and there's been a lot of Western polling on this, there's been man on the street interviews by NBC, the people of Crimea by something like over 80% say they want to be part of Russia.”

“If you were to look at any of the ratings of democracies in the world, Russia would be amongst the lowest scores. And the Ukraine would be in the high middle scores compared to the truly free countries.”

“Russia has five times the people, three times the munitions they have an industrial base.”

“Like, the two best math cultures in the world are Russia and France, and like, we hire ad nauseum from France.”

“We never worked with China. We never worked with Russia.”

“Said this is a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election. And what you'll see in those documents was not President Obama asking, ah, look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled the election. It was, Provide me with an assessment saying how Ru…”

“This December eighth president's daily brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia. That brief was pulled. It was never published. It was pulled back from publish…”

“Russia, Ukraine. I think it's going to settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year, economic and other political factors, but I do think it's going to settle out this year, and it's going to bring a bit mor…”

“So that was in a single year of slightly over 12,000 Brits arrested for speech acts, and that is more than were arrested that year in Russia, more than in China, more than in Turkey.”

“About a fifth of it comes exclusively from Iran and Venezuela, and now all of that is off the table. So if you take that, and then you see what Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Josh Greenbaum have been doing, which is trying to get a deal done in Russia, an…”

“I think we're getting close to a deal on Ukraine, Russia.”

“This is the same kind of threat inflation that we've heard for years from neocons about Russia's supposedly Imperial ambitions to conquer all of Europe. There's simply no basis for believing it.”